Grade: C

Verdict: Nothing like the King Arthur you've seen before and, mostly, a mess.

By BOB LONGINO
Cox News Service

In digging their big, muddy hole to make "King Arthur," producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Antoine Fuqua may have made it too deep to climb out of.

They chose to completely ignore the traditional Arthurian legend -- all that stuff about knights in glistening armor and jousting and Camelot.

This "King Arthur," set around 450 A.D., is more like the down-and-dirty one-on-one combat in "Braveheart," or better, a really, really cheap knockoff of "Gladiator."

Guinevere (Keira Knightley) shows up as a kick-butt fighting maiden. By the time the big battle rolls up, she's taken off most of her clothes, put on tiny straps of leather and joined a band of female hellcats who start taking down bad boys' names.

In other words, Disney's "King Arthur" is all about dirt and mud and grrrr! and fighting and arrows flying through the air. It may be watchable, but it's not this summer's "Pirates of the Round Table" -- I mean, "Pirates of the Caribbean."

"King Arthur" won't charm you, hardly ever will thrill you, and certainly will have you laughing less with it than at it.

There is an Arthur (Clive Owen), a Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd of "Black Hawk Down"), a Galahad, a Gawain and other warriors.

In this movie, you can always spot Arthur and pretty much tell who Lancelot is. But all those other knights? You're on your own. They're either lookalike skinheads or men with faces lost in wild and long hair, braids, beards and painted body art. Do like me and, amongst yourselves, refer to them as Curly Joe, the Prisoner of Azkaban, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. Trust me, it makes things easier.

Arthur and his posse are stalwart knights from some faraway Eastern land. They are beholden to Rome to serve however and wherever the Italians see fit. That means they're no-nonsense cops on that little island that eventually becomes England.

They battle unruly locals until, eventually, they don't. And (here's where the movie starts to get really, really foggy) . . . and . . . and . . . they end up fighting the ugly, take-no-prisoners Saxons, led by the growling Cerdic ("Good Will Hunting's" snooty teacher, Stellan Skarsgård).

The movie is a constant contradiction in quality. At times, you can hear the distant footfalls of the ever-closer Saxons. Trouble is, they're marching through snow. A confrontation atop a treacherous lake of ice starts with a supremely cheap computer-generated image, but the scene ultimately delivers the film's strongest emotional outburst from the actors and a harrowing fight with Saxons as the ice begins to crack. As the film rolls on, there's even more head-scratching. There's a kind of nasty underground Christian holding tank (maybe the Inquisition?), an odd whooping call among Arthur's fellow knights and a brain-numbing number of arrows. Way too many arrows.

Oh, and did you know Stonehenge, today found in central southern England, was once situated smack dab by the sea?